2022 was a momentous year for Web3, with many events occurring on the macro scale and leaving an imprint on the public consciousness for right and wrong reasons. Partnerships in this space are often forged quicker than in more traditional industries, not due to recklessness, but out of necessity. The space is incredibly dynamic and one should be anticipatory, rather than reactionary, lest they’ve already lost the race to deliver products that people need. This year we met up with the leading blockchain research and software engineering company, Nethermind, and were inspired by the work they’ve been doing to move the industry forward during these uncertain times.
On 15th September, the Ethereum network underwent arguably the biggest event in its 7-year history — the Merge. To shed light on this momentous occasion, Nethermind’s CEO Tomasz Stanczak visited Seoul and gave a talk at a KryptoSeoul event Celebrating and Understanding The Merge. The Nethermind project was bootstrapped in 2017 and received an Ethereum Foundation grant in 2018 to deliver the full client implementation. Since then, Nethermind has worked alongside the Ethereum Foundation on many Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs). As such, it was an amazing opportunity for Web3 builders and enthusiasts to have Tomasz, an expert in the field working closely with the Ethereum Foundation, to explain some of the more perplexing points of the merge and more.
Although Tomasz had to head to Buidl Vietnam shortly afterwards, our team were fortunate enough to meet with one another and share each other’s vision of Web3 in the future. Eager to meet again and learn from the best, our team set up an online meeting to speak with CGO Antonio Sabado and the team from their London office and discussed the possibility of meeting again on their home turf.
Bisonai
After partnering with Krust Universe in mid-2022, Bisonai set to work on the MARBLEX MBX Marketplace, officially released in November 2022 as part of MBX 2.0. We went into more detail about it in our official blog. The project set the stage for our young team and proved beyond a doubt that we could focus on AAA projects, under tight schedules with many moving parts. The MBX Marketplace is central to the MBX Playground and was a broad project for our team which entailed us becoming experts in gamefi, decentralized exchange mechanics, blockchain data display and much more. As our experience and knowledge grow, we are excited and confident that we can utilize our experiences for other clients to ‘build blockchain infrastructure for Web3’.
London
Eager to meet our old friends at Nethermind, we decided to visit London for Token2049 in the first week of November. Arguably the last and biggest global blockchain event of 2022, we set our sights on visiting both NFT. London the week before and Token2049 the following week in order to get out there and meet industry players who were descending on London from all around the world.
Despite what was occurring in crypto due to the FTX fallout, Token2049 itself was amazing. Not only did it host a bunch of top-tier companies who were giving talks about the state of crypto — present and future, but there were also thousands of attendees meeting each other in order to find potential business opportunities with one another.
Bisonai caught up with Nethermind at their booth where many of their staff had flown in from all different corners of the planet to meet industry and field any technical questions put to them — whether simple or complicated. Off the back of several large-scale projects, Nethermind is always on the lookout for emerging trends in Web3. In such an emergent, highly dynamic industry, competitive start-ups of such ilk must always be on their toes in order to recognise trends and find new opportunities.
After meeting with Nethermind in Seoul and in London, we at Bisonai definitely felt like we are speaking the same language and were inspired by all of the things that they have achieved in such a short amount of time. By showing great technical leadership to various companies and helping those parties get to the next level — Nethermind has grown from just a small team of a dozen to more than 220+ staff in 45+ countries in around 2 years!
Nethermind — shaping the world of Web3
Ever since the Ethereum Foundation grant in 2018, Nethermind has worked tirelessly to deliver a reliable and high-performance Ethereum client to the market. The experience they gained by working so closely alongside the foundation gave them the experience they needed to recognize what was needed by other Layer 1s and blockchain companies.
Nethermind was instrumental in bringing to life Voyager, StarkNet block explorer, an integral tool for the StarkNet blockchain. StarkNet operates as an L2 network over Ethereum, enabling any dApp to achieve unlimited scale for its computation — without compromising Ethereum’s composability and security. As such, the experience that Nethermind gained by working on Ethereum was highly applicable from not only a technical standpoint but also a practice in working on large-scale projects across multiple teams. Voyager provides a window for anyone to interact with the most cutting-edge ZK-Rollup, through a clean and minimal UI. Find out more about Nethermind on their website.
It goes without saying that Nethermind, with their foresight and expertise, has the technical capabilities - research and engineering alike - to move the blockchain industry forward. Nethermind has a team of world-class builders and researchers, Nethermind’s work touches almost every part of the Web3 ecosystem, from their Nethermind node to fundamental cryptography research and application-layer protocol development.
We are grateful to build a strong beginning relationship with one another and potentially work with each other on exciting projects moving forward. As such, we at Bisonai are absolutely delighted to learn from their expertise and share our drive and vision for the future of Web3.